Driver of Business Success: Internal Customer Service

A great cost to business success is the time, energy, and resource imbalance between the customer experience and the employee experience.

To elevate your employee’s experience, you must begin with the company values and implement meaningful intentionality that incentives and empowers. To have a thriving business, you cannot afford to have neglected or undervalued teams that are improperly served.

In today’s video, executive coach Tim Flemming discusses just that and leads you through ways to better your employee’s experience while gaining a thriving business.

Hi, Tim Flemming, a coach with Transcend. Now, we all believe, and we all know that our client experience and client satisfaction are key drivers for our business success. We spend significant time and resources, making sure that our client experience is optimized. However, too often, our internal customers and our employee experience are neglected, unvalued and just improperly served. We’ve seen behavior inside our organization that doesn’t fit our value system. It’s inconsiderate, lacks empathy, and just poor or perhaps short communication with each other. Now this can happen anywhere in the business, but especially we’ve seen it happen on the cost side of the business. We would never want this type of behavior to be what our external customers experience. And it can’t be for what our employees experience. So if we want to have a truly thriving business, this needs to change. 

To elevate the employee experience, company values are a great place to start and can be a great guide. However, it needs to go further. Just as you align and define the client experience and then put your talent, your resources and processes in order to match those, those expectations. The same type of intentionality with the employee experience must be in place. This means process flows, escalation plans, non-negotiables of behaviors for all internal stakeholders. Then these expectations must be modeled, must be defined, and it must be reinforced through meetings and communication, corporate communication, one-on-one check-ins, performance reviews. All of this will incentivize your employees in order to take advantage of the internal stakeholder plan. Bottom line is that our talent must be empowered to give peer feedback on all of this. Positive and opportunity. It can’t just come from top down. All right, so let’s take the how a little bit further. 

We would advocate that you gather a team of cross-functional leaders and influencers in order to have a dedicated work session or what the vision and ideal state for an internal customer service to look like. And in this, you need to also pair that with what the current state is, having an honest conversation about it, and making sure that you highlight both the strengths as well as the opportunities that are evident within the business. Then you move on to setting the non-negotiables and expectations around the employee behavior, creating a plan for communication, as well as reinforcement to the plan, because the importance of this is so high within the business, we would also advocate that you create a change management team that is assigned to this, possibly project owners, and then treat it as the same importance as you would any other business initiative that you have. The bottom line is, is that if you want a thriving business, you need to focus as much on the employee experience as you do the customer experience. Please reach out to Transcend. We would love to partner with you.

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